Expanded Photography 5/2/26
Leor Miller, Zhi Wei Hiu, Renée Green
Leor Miller - Dividing Water from Water
Ptolemy
6733 Central Ave, Glendale (Queens)
Closes May 10
This show is so truly excellent that I’m rushing out the dispatch this month in hope that the readers get as many days as possible to make it to Ptolemy in Glendale before it closes on May 10th. Miller’s black and white prints are so deeply phenomenological that it makes you want to do something more than see them— to hear them in the dark, or enter them as if you were entering a theater ready to suspend your own identity.
Photographers often over-rely on observation. They hope photographs will rain down upon them as they point their lenses around what Merleau-Ponty refers to as “the ready-made world of man”. On the first day God made light, and photographers owe a lot to that. Miller understands that photographs can be made on the second day; before there was land & seas, before the expanse of skies, long before “man”, “woman”.
The images are clearly an homage to the great Barbara Ess but go beyond a simple comparison. The artists’ choice of title for visually similar work illustrates the difference: Ess’s mid 80’s pinhole work titled Food For the Moon refers to Gurdijeff’s ideas of humanity’s unconscious, mechanical actions. Miller’s title, Dividing Water from Water, speaks to the conscious forces of creation itself.(Genesis 1:6)
In her use of pinholes, modified lenses and darkroom manipulations, the light captured in the moment (Day One of Creation, so to speak), is pulled away form the readymade, observable world to be shepherded by her processes into a much less clearly-ordered Creation than is usual in photographs.
Zhi Wei Hiu - Swim Lessons
RainRain
110 Lafayette # 201
Closes May 2
A beautiful small group show of a wide range of sculptural work with one artist, Zhi Wei Hiu, engaging directly with photography’s materials through sculptural interventions. The most surprising is a series of untitled 4x5” contact prints framed in metal drying trays and covered with bubbling, heat-distorted glass. The subjects (stacks of earmarked books, a self portrait) only reveal themselves as one presses up close to the strange object on the wall, but from afar appear only as indistinct “photo-like” objects.
We’re familiar with how a photograph “looks” and can interpret it as something photographic from faraway, but the subject is oblique until we really look through the distorted glass. Her works in this show defy a straight reading, teetering between photography’s relationships with the abstract, an engagement with the material reality of the medium, and our ability to “see” a photograph at all to begin with.
Renée Green - Secret
Bortolami
55 Walker St
Thru May 16
The conceptual scope of this work is so incredibly vast that I’m not even going to try with this one. The installation is beautiful, completely oblique, confusing, enticing. The links between her subjects, everything from utopian politics, architecture, race, language, perception, and decay, are curiously legible and opaque at the same time. It rewards long viewing, time to listen to the narration, take in the 3 channel video— but more time in the gallery didn’t clarify anything for me, rather it burrowed new connections between poles somewhere below my consciousness. It’s the kind of installation where the concept is so high that the air gets thin and takes awhile to acclimate, and I don’t know if I ever did.